ENTREVESTOR: New venture fund invests in SalesRight

Halifax-based SalesRight has raised $250,000 in a pre-seed funding round led by Concrete Ventures, the first investment made by the new Atlantic Canadian venture capital fund.

Concrete Ventures, which has more than $17 million to invest, offers investments from $100,000 to $750,000 to pre-seed companies in Atlantic Canada. The fund is helmed by Patrick Hankinson and received a commitment of $15 million from the Nova Scotia government last year.

Hankinson co-founded Tether, a leading Halifax tech company early in the decade, and was a founder of Compilr, a code learning platform, which was acquired by Lynda, before Lynda was acquired by LinkedIn.

Hankinson has personally invested in 14 companies as an angel investor, but SalesRight is Concrete Ventures’ first investment.

SalesRight is developing software to streamline complex pricing models for business-to-business sales in the Software-as-a-Service market.

“Pricing is one of the biggest levers that can boost the underlying economics of a business,” said Hankinson in a statement. “Yet, executives often have little to no insights on how their pricing impacts their overall business. Nobody's tackling this problem the way SalesRight is, and that’s where I see the opportunity. With the experience Bill and his co-founders bring to the table, I’m excited to be a part of this.”

Bill Wilson, CEO of SalesRight and former CEO of the mobile app development agency MindSea, said in an interview the raise will be used to expand SalesRight’s three-member team.

It will also build on the company’s recent success in acquiring customers in the U.S. and Canada, he said.

The company’s main goal is to allow clients to configure custom deals with their customers, he said, the same way customers are used to buying simple Software as a Service products today.

“We’re really trying to take that configure price quote element, that is usually quite laborious, and make it a lot simpler for the sales reps, and also make it more transparent for the customers who are actually buying,” said Wilson.

The software creates a pricing guide and sales document solution, either highly customized or a standard template, both of which will reflect pricing and special deals. They will allow customers to accept terms directly from the guide.

Wilson said the software is designed to support existing sales process and allow salespeople to cut down on back-and-forth while protecting the sales rep-customer relationship.

He said it puts all the information that would come slowly through email, over the course of hours or days, and up-front in a way buyers can interact with. The goal isn’t to reduce sales reps’ ability to identify pain points and problems, but to clear up communication on the pricing and options for solutions.

In addition, the software uses analytics to give the sales rep information on what the customer is interacting with.

“Their follow-ups become much more relevant and more timely, because now they can actually understand what their prospect is looking at and actually bring that up with them, and say, ‘OK this is clearly important to you, lets talk about it.,’” said Wilson. “One of three things: you either understand it and you really want it; you don’t understand it; or you’re curious about it. Either way, its something actionable.”